In many areas of commerce, an almost infinite variety of small items for sale, typically but not necessarily exclusively, enclosed in a plastic package or wrapping, usually with a cardboard or other insert carrying descriptive information about the product, are suspended from elongated generally rigid wire or plastic hooks or prongs supported at one end of the hooks on an apertured supporting structure with the other end passing through slots in the packages so that the product packages are suspended or hanging from the hooks for observation and choice by a potential purchaser for the product in question. The hooks are made long enough to support a multiplicity of the items at the same time and at their free ends are ordinarily (but not necessarily) tilted or inclined upwardly at a slight angle to keep items from falling off inadvertently. With the approximately horizontal orientation of the hooks, as one item is removed, the remainder do not advance (or slide down) to the free inclined hook ends but stay in their initial positions spaced therefrom. Consequently, after the leading item is removed, access to the next item on a given hook can be awkward, especially if a considerable number of the hooks are arranged on the supporting board in fairly close proximity, as is desirable from the merchant's standpoint for maximum utilization of the display area. Thus, there is need for display hooks equipped with a “pusher” operating from the rear as the leading item of a hook is removed by a customer, to advance or displace forwardly the remaining items on that hook so that the next item assumes the forward accessible position thereon, this function being repeated for the next items in series until a sufficient number of items have been removed for sale, and a fresh group of items are loaded on the hook forward of the pusher to begin the procedure all over again.
There are now available in the marketplace display hooks that have been re-designed in entirety to incorporate a pusher feature. While this is one solution to the problem, it confronts the merchant with a different, and perhaps more serious from the merchant's viewpoint, problem in that this solution renders obsolete and superfluous the merchant's existing inventory of conventional display hooks and requires the purchase of new, and presumably more expensive, hooks of the new configuration.
There is, hence, a need for an accessory suitable for association with, or assembly on, existing conventional display hooks that functions, as the front item is removed from a hook, to “automatically” shift forwardly any items remaining on the hook until the new leading item encounters resistance at the free hook end but without, of course, pushing items entirely off of the hook.